anniversary cake

Hi all,I am new to this site and hoping someone could help me. I have made character cakes for my kids using the wilton books many years ago. Other than that I don't have much experience. I currently am working as a cake decorator at a grocery store, but they don't train on how to decorate really, but I can do basic borders. My anniversary is coming up and I am having a renewal of vows ceremony and thought of making my own cake to save money. I would like it to be two tiered with white cake with a filling for one layer and the other one possibly chocolate. It needs to serve 50-75. I would like white trim like scroll work or ribbons on sides and fresh roses on top. My questions are should I try to make my own cakes or buy them un-iced from a grocery store somewhere. What size would I need to feed that many? Any recipe ideas? Also what is some simple scroll work or borders that I could do? I should mention that my husband has been away for 8 months and is home for only 2 weeks starting 3 days before the event and I don't want to stress for hours over this. Sorry this letter so long. Any suggestions would be great! Thanks so much.Barb

Of course you can make your own and not buy it. I think baking the cake is the easiest part and if you're going to decorate it yourself you might as well do it all. You could even use a box cake if you didn't want to make it from scratch. I use box cakes all the time and I freeze them before I frost them so they're easier to work with. According to the Wilton website 12"x4" round cake pan with a top tier of 8"x4" round cake pan feeds 56 so you could either use slightly larger cakes pans for the two tiers or you could add another small tier. If you just ice it with plain white buttercream frosting and then put fresh flowers on the top of each tier it would look BEAUTIFUL and would be very simple. If you look at the pictures of my cakes there is one with calla lillies on it and it was really easy. Just do fresh flowers rather than making them out of fondant. Let me know if you have any questions.